One Year in our Wayne Home

We have now been in our Wayne Home for over a year and it has been pretty good. We are getting ready to plant some trees, put in our front walkway, and landscape the front of the house. We may even screen in our porch above the walkout. Customer care has been decent to work with, but we still have some issues that need addressed. 

Our customer care issues this year have included:

  *A leaky window in the sunroom & missing shingle on our porch - These took several months to get fixed, but are no longer issues. 

  *blown off siding on our garage peak. This was addressed within 72 hours - awesome. 

  *Missing insulation in our sunroom peak where it meets the kitchen - We had some rather high electric bills and we wanted to make sure we weren't missing anything major in terms of our home's efficiency. After a free home energy audit from our electric co-op, a thermal imaging camera determined that we had no insulation in our wall. This caused condensation to form and drip....which we honestly wouldn't have noticed. We had a different insulation company come out and they are going to have to take the drywall down to insulate, then re-drywall and paint. This will most likely be done when the contractors aren't busy, but we haven't heard anything back for two months.

  *Doors settling - we haven't been able to use our entry deadbolt since we moved in and our boys' closet doors rub the carpet. My oldest son can barely move his doors. This was submitted in October after a home visit from our awesome consultant, physically and verbally addressed in January, and never touched after that. We need to call and ask for it to be taken care of.

  *Phantom shower running in our master bath - this happens every time we get out of the shower and is pretty forceful and loud at times. The plumber came out and tried to fix it, but we have come to the conclusion we may just have to live with it because it still happens. 

  *Furnace whistling and knocking. The furnace guys came and addressed a whistling noise they determined was coming from the filter door and put some type of cushion under the support bars holding the ducts so that when the furnace ran, it was quiet. This fixed the whistling, but didn't fix the knocking. My six year old has a noise machine in is room and that's how we have fixed that problem.  

  *basement crack where sunroom crawl space meets basement - this was fixed when the door issues were verbally addressed in January. It was siliconed from the outside.

  Other than that, we are noticing more nail pops and a few small seam cracks and that is to be expected in new construction. We will wait until our two year fit and finish to get anything drywall related addressed. 

  Last summer (2014), we got a landscape plan done with a local business. For $150, he gave us giant blueprints of our home's landscape and property and gave us a plan of low-maintenance and year-long blooming plants. If we had an extra 25k sitting around, he would have had someone make this blueprint happen. But (surprise!) we don't have an extra 25k hanging out, so we will do little by little on our own. These are the blueprints:

This is just around our house, with retaining walls on the right side around the walkout and a patio/firepit off of the sunroom on the left. 

This is our property map. The catch here is that we decided to put in a pond after we had this done, so that takes up much of the space between our house and barn. It also wipes out our garden area. We need to figure out a new place for that. :) 

We planted grass in the fall of 2014 after they dug our pond. It rained like crazy, so we didn't think much of it would survive. But it did! Here are some updated shots before any landscaping:

We took a lot of dirt from the pond and built this hill up.

After a year, we are finding a few things we wish we had done different...none of which are major. We love our vinyl wood-look flooring, but we wish we had gone to a level 3 or higher darker carpet. We wish we had done a few extra outlets as well as a few different register locations and a different paint color for our great room (because sometimes the SW 'Perfect Greige' looks perfectly pink..gross). All of these things are petty. We have also been very happy with our Anderson Silverline windows so far. 

We haven't had much to write about, so we will probably only update this blog as new things arise or as we make changes. 

We hope your build research and process is going well!

  

We dug a year ago today!

It has been one year since our "Dig Day" with Wayne Homes...and now that we have been through the process, it seems like it flew by! 

Our Sunroom has a new waterfront view!

Our entryway and Pinterest crib bench

Love the way our island turned out!

Here are some updated shots of our yard dirt, pond, and projects. 

Before our contractors started the pond

They moved so fast!

My little man riding on the big machine!

Daddy & his little man with shovels "digging"

Little man making sand angels?

Drilling for dock posts

Making progress

View from the bottom of the pond

Some water & our special visitor!

Updated 10/13/14 - we have grass! :) Ot didn't all wash away like we thought. Now to fill the pond....come on, Mother Nature!

Hillbilly engineering at its finest - prepping grass

Post grass seed :(

Post grass seed. Some negative grade issues we wish we had caught.

Our grass seed flowing to the creek. There went $1000 and over 40 hours of work! :-(

I still need to post an updated picture of our yard with grass. It looks nice from the road, but we do need to do some additional work....and landscaping, of course. :)

Our first fall mantel

Budget friendly pinspired basement fakeover 

Basement after a $17 gallon of paint & some $2 Staples engineering prints. Free couches courtesy of our neighbors. Leather recliner = $10 @ garage sale.

As far as customer care, we need to call them back. They aren't huge issues. We have missing shingles from June, and WH hasn't had anyone out to address the issue with the main pipe leaking last month. We had to have our excavator come out to plug the area where our waterlines come in. Hubby fixed the grade around the house (w the exception of around the patio, which will require additional planning and a window well). This seems to have helped immensely. I think we are getting to the point where dirt has settled and the basement will stay dry. 

If only we could find a way to eliminate the basement dust!

House Projects

Our door before

Our door after the screen door was installed by Lowe's. Wayne Homes does not offer screen doors, so this was an additional cost once me moved in. We really like them, though. 

Our laundry before

Our laundry after. I have a hanging bar inbetween the cabinets for dress clothes. I got the in-stock cabinets at Lowe's for around $65 each on sale, which was considerably less than WH's estimate. My husband didn't enjoy putting them up, but said it was worth it for the savings. We still need to cover up the area between the w/d and wall, as we have already lost some things back there.

Garage before

Garage before paint, screen door, and organizing... Mind you we had already moved this mess several times! 

Garage after paint...with screen door. I was inspired by Pinterest, but refused to spend money on fancy lockers or benches and wanted to repurpose what we had from our last house. So that's what I did. My favorite is the screen door. I can't tell you how many times our 5 year old has left the door open, so this will be a nice way to save energy! 

*Note: if you are considering adding a screen door to your garage entry, make sure you have brick molding and not interior molding around the door frame. WH installed interior molding around the door and we had to remove it to install brick mold. The interior molding would have been fine without the door (in fact neither my husband nor myself would have even noticed).

Our burlap initial wreath...this was so easy to make! 

Our family tree project on the dining room wall is nearly finished! This was something I have wanted to do for quite awhile and I'm not sure I realized how intense it would be. Not only did I use all of my random photo frames accumulated over the last 15 years, but I also used 4x more of the Command adhesive strips for hanging pictures than I thought I would. There isn't a single nail hole in this wall, and if one of the frames isn't level it is very easy to fix. Those things are AWESOME! 

Window is fixed, pond starts soon!

The Silverline repairman was here yesterday and he is so darned nice! Apparently he had to seal the mull on the window and he added caulking.

We found out The 84 lumber guy was the one that dropped the ball on our window repair. It was even in his notes to "please take care of ASAP because [he] forgot to turn this in two weeks ago." 

Our pond is getting dug Tuesday. Weather permitted it should take a few days. 😁😃 

Gotta love checking things off of the list! 

Spring paint is done!

The island is painted 

And so is the entry door! 

They also filled holes in the molding and on the columns, painted the garage man door and the door off of our master bedroom, and were here most of the day. 

The Lowes guy was back to finish installing the right pieces on our blinds and out screen doors will be installed next week! Hopefully we will have a solid idea of our patios and sidewalk so that can get started soon as well. 

If 84 lumber doesn't call us by the end of the week to fix our leaky window, we will be calling customer care again. 

It feels good to get settled and have things checked off of our list! :) 

Feelin' good... And then came rain.

We had our blinds fixed today and talked to our old project manager's boss about getting our spring paint and exterior items finished. Things were looking good to finally be done with projects. Then we got water in our sunroom windowsill. I couldn't figure out where it was coming from for awhile but realized it was dripping down the top of our middle window. 

The puddle, even though it's hard to see.

The constant dripping

I made a second phone call to the WH rep I talked to earlier and had the blinds guy take down the sunroom blinds so they don't get ruined. 

Here is to hoping we can wrap this all up!

Fireplace = repaired. Spring paint? Up in the air.

Yesterday, Kerns came to fix our fireplace. It took about 15 minutes and we are so happy that's over with. 

Now we are waiting on Spring paint (exterior nail holes, front door and sidelights, and our island paint & repair since we are on our third countertop and second caulk). Our field manager is doing some work in a new office in West Virginia so all of his homes are being taken care of by his boss.

Hopefully this gets taken care of so we can get our screen doors installed! We don't like turning on our air conditioning until we have to. :) 

In other news, we had to call Lowe's to have our Bali blinds changed from tilt wands to cords. Nearly all of the wands broke on their second or third use, so that was disappointing given what we paid for them. They look nice, so hopefully the switch to cords will help their longevity.